I didn’t enjoy The Incomplete Enchanter too much. On the other hand, I didn’t hate it either. It was just kind of there. The idea that L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt had was to explore the physics
of magic by placing modern day psychologists into fictional magic worlds. There the scientists have adventures as well as extrapolate what the rules are that govern magic in the realms they visit.
Harold Shea is psychologist number one. Not so big on theory, he wants to test Reed Chalmers’ theory of parallel worlds. So he makes himself a sylllogismobile. There’s no actual machine or other vehicle. He just has to repeat syllogisms until he believes them (or something of the sort) to transfer himself. His target is Irish mythology, but he’s not very good and not very prepared and ends up in Norse mythology.
In the second half, constructed from a different short story, both Shea and Chalmers head to Edmund Spenser’s world of The Faerie Queene. This adventure is a little more involved than Shea’s sojourn to Asgard.
The stories by de Camp and Pratt were written in 1940. Since then various authors have written a billion real people travel to magic land
stories and I’ve read a few. So I’m a little jaded, even though de Camp and Pratt weren’t really trying to serve the same purpose as most of the later authors. Though part of it is about the fish out of water aspect, the main purpose is just exploring the implications of the rules in each of the two systems. The strangers in the strange land can explore assumptions that the residents would never think to question.
But, like I wrote, it just didn’t interest me in any deep way once I started reading.
Title: The incomplete enchanter
Author: L. Sprague de Camp; Fletcher Pratt
Cover artist: Richard Powers
Imprint / publisher: Pyramid
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 192 p.
Publication date: August 1960 (originally 1941)
